Main Points:

• placement of the hit counter
• student satisfaction
• lack of awareness of the site
• training, rather than development
• pages to support a course

The low number of recorded ‘hits’ on the CILL site ( times since 18th September 1997) may be due to the positioning of the hit counter. This was not put on the default home page because this page is accessed as the startup page when any student in CILL wishes to use any part of the Internet. Therefore the hit counter was put on a page which is exactly the same as the home page, but which is only accessed when a student returns to the home page after accessing other pages on the CILL site. This happens much less frequently than hits to the startup page, and users do not have to go back to the home page to browse around the site. Therefore the hit counter is not an accurate measure of the number of hits on the site, but no better place for the counter has been found.

The low level of use of the learner training and development opportunities provided by the CILL pages could be for one of three reasons.

Firstly, it could be due to the students overall satisfaction with their perceived independent language learning abilities, a satisfaction found as the result of a different research project. Thus students might feel they have no need to access the learner training and development opportunities provided on the CILL site.

Secondly, CILL students might not know of the existence of these learner training opportunities, perhaps because they rarely use the CILL Internet site as a whole, perhaps because some students do not use the Internet, and perhaps because the site is not mentioned in the orientation students receive when they first come to CILL.

Thirdly, when asked what type of learner training they would like in CILL, the students tended to pick learner training rather than learner development options, for example, how to use the computers to learn English, and how to book a room.

A different pilot study of supporting the Communication Studies for Year One Computing students service English E.A.P. course by providing a series of web pages has proved much more popular with the students, with hits since 18th September 1997.